Configuration Management

Native Support for Windows – CFEngine Nova users can employ fine-grained management of Microsoft Windows servers and desktops, including native control of the Windows Registry, Windows Services and Windows Access Control Lists (ACLs). A new technical whitepaper on “Windows Management with CFEngine 3 Nova” is available here.

Ensure Faster IT Compliance — CFEngine 3 Nova simplifies the implementation and compliance of commercial and government IT regulations, such as PCI-DSS, SOX 404, STIGs, and accepted industry best practices. Nova provides extensive out-of-the-box and flexible customization of policies and reports, allowing organizations to complete IT audits in hours instead of weeks.

Improved Hypervisor Integration — enhanced support for creating and managing XEN/KVM virtual machines on the fly, using the industry standard libvirt API library.

Support for Mission-Critical High Availability through a fully redundant, lightweight architecture for system information updating. Users get reliable and predictable insight, with fault recovery times of only a few minutes in case of failure — something that cannot be easily matched by competing software.

Chef is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of your business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout your entire infrastructure. Because it combines the fundamental elements of configuration management and service oriented architectures with the full power of Ruby, Chef makes it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure.

How Chef Works

You write “recipes” that describe how you want a part of your server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state – packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. Chef makes sure each resource is properly configured, and gives you a safe, flexible, easily-repeatable mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly the way you want them to.

Why Chef Works

Most infrastructure solutions force you to adapt to their “one-size-fits-all” approaches, even though every infrastructure challenge is different. That’s crazy-talk. And it’s precisely the reason why Chef is built directly on top of Ruby, a dynamic, open-source programming language, integrated with well-known cloud platforms like Rackspace and EC2, and built to seamlessly integrate into your existing environment. We designed Chef from the ground up to allow you to focus on solving your real business problems – because reality is chaotic enough. Dealing with it shouldn’t be.